[Top Agency Series] Growth and Evolution of an Ad Agency With Paulo Salomao of King Ursa

Paulo Salomao is the Founder and CEO of King Ursa, a full-service advertising agency renowned for its creative-first approach and robust performance-driven strategies. Originally from Brazil, he traveled to Toronto to learn English and ultimately fell in love with Canada, where he cultivated a career in design, art direction, and film. With over a decade of agency experience, Paulo’s leadership has rocketed King Ursa to recognition as one of the top creative agencies in Canada. He is passionate about balancing artificial and emotional intelligence in communication and advocates for culture and trust in business relationships.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [03:14] Paulo Salomao discusses the origin of King Ursa
• [04:05] The story behind King Ursa’s name and how the bear became their mascot
• [06:07] Paulo’s journey from Brazil to Canada and establishing his own agency
• [10:15] The gradual growth of King Ursa’s workspace and how the agency adapted to the team’s expansion
• [14:09] The pivotal hires that contributed to King Ursa’s success, including data scientists
• [21:03] Implementing effective operations and maintaining a vibrant agency culture
• [28:20] How Paulo’s role at the agency evolved over time
• [30:08] Trust and how it powers successful client relationships
• [35:09] The value of emotion in advertising

In this episode…

An agency can begin in a garage and grow into a creative powerhouse to influence an industry. But what does it take to build an agency from the ground up while maintaining an unwavering focus on culture and client relationships?

Entrepreneur and advertising professional Paulo Salomao reveals the intricacies of crafting a top-ranking advertising agency in Canada. He shares his story of evolution, determination, and strategic hires. He walks us through the journey of agency growth, both in staff and workspace, emphasizing the critical role trust plays in client relationships. Paulo also explains the importance of maintaining an agency’s culture and how he tackles the challenges he faces as a founder.

In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Paulo Salomao, Founder and CEO of King Ursa, about cultivating agency culture and maintaining strong client relationships. Paulo discusses the origin of King Ursa, the gradual growth of the agency’s workspace and team size, how to implement effective operations and maintain a vibrant agency culture, and the value of emotion in advertising.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Paulo Salomao on LinkedIn
• King Ursa

Special Mention(s):

• Start with NO…The Negotiating Tools that the Pros Don’t Want You to Know by Jim Camp
• What the Heck Is EOS?: A Complete Guide for Employees in Companies Running on EOS by Gino Wickman .
• Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman
• The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever by Michael Bungay Stanier
• Vice Trap by Elliott Gilbert
• Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz
• “Do schools kill creativity?” by Sir Ken Robinson

Related episode(s):

• “[Sweet Process Series] How to Save Hundreds of Hours a Month Using Top Productivity Tools with Adi Klevit of Business Success Consulting Group” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Agency Series] How to Make Your Website Awesome and Avoid the Report of Broken Dreams With Andy Crestodina, Co-Founder of Orbit Media Studios” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Growth Through Acquisitions – What is Your KPI and Northstar? With Jason Swenk” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Building a Great Team and More Helpful Insights with Jason Swenk Host of The Smart Agency Master Class Podcast” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Leading with Passion with Gino Wickman Founder of EOS Worldwide” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “If you can measure, you should be evolving it.”
• “Trust and loyalty is everything — you lose trust, I think it’s a hard thing to get back.”
• “You cannot accomplish anything new if you’re not prepared to be wrong.”
• “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”
• “Creating psychological safety allows people to fail and grow through their mistakes.”
• “Emotion is extremely important to having a process of communication.”

Action Steps:

1. Emphasize the emotional element in brand communication: It helps foster deep, authentic connections with consumers, which in turn drives brand loyalty and long-term success.
2. Implement a transparent and empowering company culture: This promotes trust among team members and encourages creative risk-taking for innovation.
3. Embrace the value of quantifiable data to drive advertising performance: It helps in making informed decisions, optimizing strategies, and measuring success in a concrete way.
4. Invest in professional growth through mentorship and continued learning: This keeps you updated on industry trends and best practices, providing a competitive edge.
5. Leverage the blend of artificial and emotional intelligence in your communication strategies: This balance ensures that while you utilize cutting-edge technology and data, you still resonate with people on a human level.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I have Paulo of the King Ursa. You can check them out at kingursa.com. And Paulo, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast. People should check out. Since this is part of the top agency series, some of the really cool agencies I’ve had on, I had Adi Klevit. Adi Klevit actually decide to specialize in done for you. SOPs. So she works for the company. She comes in their team will help document SOPs, whether it’s Client Onboarding, staff onboarding, and so we geeked out our favorite productivity tools, software and everything like that. That was an interesting episode. Also had Andy Crestodina on. Andy Crestodina talked about his many years in the agency space. That was a good one. Jason Swank was also a great one, where he talked about he built up his agency to eight figures and sold it, and then had been buying up agencies and what he was looking at from a valuation perspective. So check those out and more on inspired insider.com and this episode is brought to you by Rise25.

At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the accountability, the strategy and the full execution. So Paulo, we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the host and the company so they can create amazing relationships, create amazing content and run their business. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I’ve found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you thought about podcasting, you should, if you have questions, go to rise25.com to learn more.

I’m excited to introduce Paulo Salomao. He’s the founder and CEO of King Ursa and their 30-plus-person strong full-service advertising agency. They focus on end-to-end service. And King Ursa brings research and analysis, and they also bring the strategy, the creative, the production and the media all under one roof. They were ranked in the ad industry under number 42 of the top creative agencies in Canada. He also does a lot of speaking. He speaks on the growing need for balancing artificial versus emotional intelligence and communication. So Paulo, thanks for joining me.

Paulo Salomao 3:01 

It’s my pleasure to be here.

Jeremy Weisz 3:04 

I’m going to share the King Ursa website as we’re talking but just start us off with King Ursa and what you do.

Paulo Salomao 3:14 

I think you’ll cover everything quite well, Jeremy, all the facets of our business there being a full-service agency. But first and foremost, we are a creative first agency. And our unique as you see on the website or unique selling proposition, is the evolution agency. We believe that everything that we do in a day of today, where you can measure, whether, if you qualify, qualifying, what the work that we’re doing, communications, if you can measure, you should be evolving it right? So, learning from the past and optimizing for the future. So, that’s our promise. That’s what I’d like you to remember, of what it is for our purposes today.

Jeremy Weisz 4:03 

Talk about the bear.

Paulo Salomao 4:05 

The bear came so the name King Ursa, we’d like to keep it, as you see in the website, we don’t talk about it like, you got to be in and in to know. So, but the bear came from back in the day we were 10 years old now, right? So the first couple years, we were the first agency to be very, very east end of Toronto and while all the other agencies were going to the west and being on the west side of Toronto altogether there, and we felt, every time we talked about people coming to visit us, we’re like, hey, come to this neck of the woods. Come see us here. Like, come and visit us, and so on. And this neck of the woods picked up. And then at some point, one of the designers used a bear, woods and bear, and Canada is, it’s one of our animals here.

So it’s just sticking. And people start buying bears for, like, buying little bear gifts and bears. And all of a sudden we had a bear as a mascot. And then when it was time to actually put a name forward, we use Ursa is actually, I’ll give that hint of the name, because Ursa is a female bear in Latin or Brazilian Portuguese, where I’m from, and then we literally speak. So that’s where the bear came from, yeah and now it’s our mascots there, and it’s such a powerful figure. The Mother Bear is definitely the apex of the forest, right? Like, you don’t mess with the Mother Bear.

Jeremy Weisz 5:37 

Totally. I was thinking you were to say you killed a bear with your bare hands. So the bear is your mascot.

Paulo Salomao 5:43 

No, man, no, I know they get good. It’s fierce for sure. And that’s the way we’re small and mighty, so that’s how we like what the bear represents for us too.

Jeremy Weisz 6:00 

Now you’re from Brazil, originally. What brought you to Toronto?

Paulo Salomao 6:07 

I came at age 21 and that was 25 years ago, and came to learn English Jeremy, and ended up not learning much in the first year, and had to stay a little longer. And after insisting and learning proper English, I decided to take some courses before I went back to Brazil and start studying design, art direction and film. And I ended up going to three different colleges in Canada, and that led to a career, and that led me to build my life here and now, 10 years later, married with two kids, married to a Canadian, and two kids, and yeah, so I just fell in love, of course, with the countries, my country now, and I absolutely love to always in Toronto. So yeah, that’s a long story. I’ll leave it for another time.

Jeremy Weisz 7:02 

How did you get into starting your own agency?

Paulo Salomao 7:07 

So the intention was never to start an agency. I was working as a art director for quite a long time, and I expanded to film so I went to Toronto Film School. Actually, I’m very curious about everything when it comes to design and everything around it. I’m a big tech guy too. I can front-end cold. I play at home with my raspberry pies and new tech I absolutely love, like to be, I’m an early adopter, for sure, of tech but all those of being so in so many different facets of the business. I even ended up studying copywriting for advertising at Hummer college here and agencies look at me and really saw in the age of social and videos, online videos were booming, saw me as someone who could actually piece that bridge all the disciplines together, but being at large agencies, I felt I wanted to move faster than the way the industry here was moving, so I ended up frustrated with my own position in the way things were moving, decided to leave and start freelancing my own actually, at the time, this about 10 years ago, and I went back to Brazil.

Spent a year in Brazil, rejuvenating and learning a lot more about the revolution of ad agencies. What was happening there, that we’re ahead of Canada, quite a bit. Of course, not because of the volume and because of the aggressiveness of the size of the country and economy and all that. So after a year, I came back and knew better what my position was and what I wanted to do and the value that I could bring to the industry. And I start freelancing. That freelancing turning to from my garage. At some point, I had people, three, four people working for me. At the time, I actually, two years later, I invited a friend to say, hey, come and help me do the same thing, just turning into something, or whether it’s an agency or whatnot. And then he came and helped me for a few years. And he was my business partner for a while, and then as Covid hit, then I decided to reopen up another business, and we both decided it was time for us to part amicably.

But yeah, so the agency was really, I’ve always believed in this organic way of growth. And I’m very, very competitive too, like, so I want, when I do something, I want to do the absolute best. So that led into, yeah, into the agency that it is today.

Jeremy Weisz 9:48 

I love to hear a little bit more of the evolution of the agency, right? So you start, you’re working for other agencies. You start freelancing. Then you have people working out of your garage with you, and then at what point do you like, okay, because you have a beautiful office. Obviously, you walked me through it before we hit record. At what point you’re like, okay, I need to get out of my garage and we need to move into an office.

Paulo Salomao 10:15 

That was the point where, I remember being it just becomes too small, like you’re in your garage, and now you need to be more face, sorry. You need to have face-to-face with people, more people that you work with first. And the garage was not it started to get too small. So it first, I got a place that was probably twice the size of my garage, so it wasn’t that big, but it was, at least, was a place, and it felt like an office. Now it felt like a and I hate the word office, but I say because off. I always say, lawyers have offices. We work in studios advertising, we have a studio. So I needed that space to feel like a studio, to feel like a play. I’ve always been an environment, esthetics, and I love that so much. I think has a huge influence on what we do. So that the need came both from face to face, even start to seeing a few clients, small clients, but start having a place to have them brainstorming and so on.

Jeremy Weisz 11:22 

I didn’t know if they were at a certain point of like a staff growth. You’re like, okay, we need to move out of here. We can’t fit everyone in here. Yes, also that comes with overhead too. Obviously, your garage, you’re not, there’s no overhead involved with that besides your house, but now you have expenses. So you started with maybe an office that was a little bit double, and at what point you moved into, what was the next move?

Paulo Salomao 11:52 

It was very gradual from that space, from the small, how can I say 40 by 40 square feet. We moved to a place that was twice the size of that and at that time we had six, seven employees. And actually the space that we found was within an industrial building that we could actually it was somewhat empty, like half empty, I should say, but like, we could actually break some walls and actually expand if we wanted to. So strategically, I chose that space because of that. And so three years later into that place, no, two years later in that place, I think we expanded to the side, and then from there we have now 20 people. And then three years later, we decided, okay, now we’re growing to 30, and we need a bigger studio, full size of students.

So we moved to even, like maybe 500-square-foot facility with a full studio editing room. And this is all before the pandemic, of course. So it was very gradual. The ambitions were there, like I’ve always looked into growth as a result of great work that we were doing so very gradually, but within time, yeah, we were in a big space, which was not the best idea when Covid hit at all time.

Jeremy Weisz 13:12 

Did you keep that space after Covid, or did you downsize.

Paulo Salomao 13:16 

I had to, we kept, I had to keep a space to offices at the point Covid hit, we were approximately 50 plus employees and two offices inside a building, and we had signed a three-year lease, and I had to stick with three years paying an extremely, extremely high rent with no one inside. And of course, we took some hit as well, like from clients, certain clients, we just couldn’t make it. So we cut relationships and decreased size, and it was tough times, definitely tough times to pay a giant rent when you’re not utilizing the space, it was a big toll on our bottom line.

Jeremy Weisz 13:56 

Yeah, it was tough for everyone, for many reasons, and since you are the evolution agency, I’m going to keep with the theme so I could see the evolution of the space. Let’s talk about the evolution of hires. What were some of the key hires along the way for you?

Paulo Salomao 14:09 

As we grew, performance has always been a huge part of who we are and why we do what we do. I do come from a traditional, sorry, digital advertising, but learned a lot and worked at traditional agencies, and I’ve always believed performance has, if or the work to be there, communications, work that we’re doing, putting out there, if it’s not moving the needle for our clients. And this is not cliché talking, I truly have always been curious about how well did a piece of creative, how well did a piece of anything that we’re putting out there, like if we’re not able to. Even for curiosity, like, was it good? Did it actually sold more products, or did summer products? Did it get people talking about it? Did it change? Was it part of the trends that you know? Was it?

I’ve obviously been very curious about all that and I believe that curiosity led us, at some point, inside King Ursa, to build upon a service that could validate all of this. And the biggest change for us was to hire data scientists. So with two data into two internal, full-time data scientists and one VP of analytics, we’re truly able to maximize the performance of everything that we do out there. So everything so we do. There’s a lot of pre-assessment of where we should go, tactically and strategically and everything. And there’s a very just as important, the post analysis of what we do. So we ended up developing our own dashboards and so on. So they lead a lot of that, all that structure and evolution of the work that we do.

[Continue to Page 2]